Three general types with in my case a spread of 5-8 hours on my fastest card and 14-18 hours on my slowest. Note that there are some that take longer, up to 30 hours if I recall correctly (rare). The three types award different amounts of credit. As with all things there is some variation and some occasional tasks that are new and different ...

If the 30hr+ WU's are so rare, can someone please explain why this is the only type of WU's that I seem to get...this has been happening for weeks...

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Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
Windows 7 - 64bit
8GB RAM
9800GX2 190.62
BOINC 6.10.9 Win64

ACTIVE PROJECTS

If the 30hr+ WU's are so rare, can someone please explain why this is the only type of WU's that I seem to get...this has been happening for weeks...

None of your last several workunits are the 30 hour kind; all are the 24xx credit variety that should only take about 10-11 hours of total crunch time each on your 9800 GX2. That is indeed the case for some of the work that shows around 40,000 sec for total completion time in your task list. However, other work is showing much longer completion times (twice as much frequently), which would indicate something wrong either with your set-up or perhaps the card itself.

I can complete individual work units fast enough. My issue is that 4 units are fetched at a time and they all have the deadline. Is there any way, other than setting my "Additional work buffer" to 0, to limit the number of tasks I have assigned at a time?

I can complete individual work units fast enough. My issue is that 4 units are fetched at a time and they all have the deadline. Is there any way, other than setting my "Additional work buffer" to 0, to limit the number of tasks I have assigned at a time?

No, sadly enough ...

I and even a couple project types asked for controls such as this to be added and we were told no ...

On the "Alpha" mailing list Dr. Anderson seems to be on a kick to eliminate configuration settings ... if anything, I am of the mind that there are far too few settings rather than too many.

I can complete individual work units fast enough. My issue is that 4 units are fetched at a time and they all have the deadline. Is there any way, other than setting my "Additional work buffer" to 0, to limit the number of tasks I have assigned at a time?

Your 9800M GT is a 96 shader card with stock clocks (1250 shader clock). I have tested this with an 8800GS (also 96 shader), and all current work unit types can be completed in less than 24 hours with a 1500 shader clock (1450 or so might work, but I haven't tried it yet). If you can overclock to that range and run 24/7, you will not have any deadline issues. Given that the 9800M is a mobile GPU, you will need to be especially careful watching the heat issues when overclocking.

BTW, that is one heck of a laptop!

Your 9800M GT is a 96 shader card with stock clocks (1250 shader clock). I have tested this with an 8800GS (also 96 shader), and all current work unit types can be completed in less than 24 hours with a 1500 shader clock (1450 or so might work, but I haven't tried it yet). If you can overclock to that range and run 24/7, you will not have any deadline issues. Given that the 9800M is a mobile GPU, you will need to be especially careful watching the heat issues when overclocking.

I tried riva tuner but I'm not sure it works correctly. I'm running Vista x64 and I get the usigned driver ignored error on install. Are there other overclocking utilities I could try? So far the hottest my video card has gotten is 75C, from what I've seen that's not too bad, what would be a sane upper limit?

BTW, that is one heck of a laptop!

Thanks! It's my powerhouse machine I bought when I went to Iraq. I also have a 5.5TB storage server I built but it's all hard drives and little processing power.

Edit:
Is there anyway to correct the estimated time to a sane value? I have work units that estimate 16 hours and climb upward for a few hours before they start going down in time remaining.

I tried riva tuner but I'm not sure it works correctly. I'm running Vista x64 and I get the usigned driver ignored error on install. Are there other overclocking utilities I could try? So far the hottest my video card has gotten is 75C, from what I've seen that's not too bad, what would be a sane upper limit?

Hmmm...Riva Tuner would have been my suggestion. Maybe some others here can suggest an alternative? On a laptop, 75C seems reasonable. My poor little T8100 has an 8400M GS which runs hotter than that (and it doesn't do crunching) and has been fine for months. The hottest it has gotten has been 92C, but mostly is in the 79-83C range. I think you need to worry the closer you get to the 100-105 range...as I recall, that is where frying a card begins.

Edit:
Is there anyway to correct the estimated time to a sane value? I have work units that estimate 16 hours and climb upward for a few hours before they start going down in time remaining.

I am afraid that this is a combination of BOINC and project-level issues that are not adjustable at the client level. Part of the issue is that the project has different types of work which vary in time to crunch, so estimated times are always going to be off a bit.